Eric Roberts IV: Local Girl Makes Good

I wasn't homeless, but close to it. A friend who was in a hot and heavy relationship with a producer boyfriend let me stay in her spare bedroom because she was never home anyway, except to change clothes. I didn't have any money so I crept in and out of the tiny Santa Monica duplex trying to leave as little footprint as possible, my belongings in a duffle bag and my pillow on a blow-up mattress. When you are on the dole from friends you learn to be humble, invisible, and colorless. Luckily my temporary-but-free digs were just down the street from Lydia's apartment, the producer of my next AFI project, Miss Lonelyhearts, so this bus-riding babe had a lift to and from work every day. Not unlike Mr. Magoo, I was walking on precarious, shifting girders far above the safety zone and prayed blindly that the next one would appear before I took a tumble.

But as bad off as I was there were others who were in worse straits. The first day we opened our production office in what had once been part of the laundry room of the Greystone Mansion, I was startled when the door of a large metal box in the corner opened and a guy in jeans and a teeshirt unfolded himself and climbed out and silently left the room. Lydia seemed nonplussed and I found out later that he was a student who couldn't afford rent so he was secretly living in what had once been an industrial size towel dryer (the hanging racks had been removed).

Between projects I was still temping in various office jobs to pay for whatever meager expenses I had, but like the guy living in the box, it didn't really matter that I was as poor as a churchmouse. I was in showbiz!

Making a student film in the 80's was kind of like working for Gnarles Barkley before they suddenly became the next big thing (if you haven't heard their song Crazy, check it out). There was a certain air of expectation about what these films could do for your career. David Lynch was the most famous AFI graduate and the success of young directors Steven Speilberg and George Lucas had major studios sending their development executives to all the graduate screenings looking for the next pheomonem. This was also the decade of the feeding frenzy around 'hot' 'young' and 'new'. Everyone wanted to be the first to cash in on breakout talent so the development executives I've discussed in previous series were the forefront of this gossip mill and they were constantly on the prowl. Since relationships made in film school often lasted an entire career there was fierce competition to get on the 'right' film with the most promising director/producer team. And word on the street was that Miss Lonelyhearts was the biggest thing going that year.

The director of the film, Michael Dinner, had found marginal success earlier as a Don McLean style singer with two albums from Fantasy Records (and one song that made the charts). His first album had featured a couple of duets with Linda Ronstadt and although it had been several years since his last album he still had enough pull with his William Morris agent to attract an 'A' list of actors to his project, including Arthur Hill, who was a staple character actor on network television, and an up and coming young star, Eric Roberts.

Miss Lonelyhearts was a film noir script, based on a 40's short story by Nathanal West. A young man, played by Eric Roberts, is the advice columnist for a city newspaper and gets embroiled in the lives of some of the women who write to him with tragic results. Lydia and Michael had ambition for this student film and they spared no expense in the production department. We had a full crew (40+), production manager, production designer, art director, director of photography, camera assistants, script supervisor, first and second assistant directors, boom operator and sound guy, costumer designer, make up artists, hair stylists, and a full complement of gaffer, grips, painters, set dressers, and grunts. Oh yes, and a production coordinator - me.

Everyone, except the lead actors who were paid scale wages, worked for free. And willingly, too. There was talk early on that PBS was interested in buying the film and even before Eric Roberts arrived for the start of principal photography, everyone was buzzing about how gorgeous and charismatic, and well, stunningly beautiful he was.

Roberts' only film credit to that date was a small film, Raggedy Man, but he'd received rave reviews for his sensitive, multi-dimensional portrait of a young sailor during WWII who'd come into the life of a lonely young woman (played by Sissy Spacek who earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance). There was something about Eric's performance that was mesmerizing and true. His vulnerabilities and dark sensuous looks made him unforgettable.

His agent apparently thought that making Miss Lonelyhearts would be a good career move for him and it wasn't until later that we understood why. All we knew in our little basement office at AFI was that a real, live heartthrob star was going to be working amongst us and the air of anticipation was intense. Down the hall in the rabbit-warren of small production offices other student films for that year were underway but they seemed to fade into the background as our ever-growing prestige and even larger production budget began to snowball.

As the production coordinator my job was a trial by fire. I'd never had such immense responsibility and since pretty much everyone had little or no experience either we were making up the rules as we went along. Later I was to discover (to my dismay) that the production coordinator on studio films was little more than a glorified, underpaid, and overworked assistant to the production manager. But here, with a production manager was clearly overwhelmed by the scope of our burgeoning project so we split the work up and functioned as a team. I learned quickly and found I had a gift for multi-tasking and, more importantly, never forgetting any detail assigned to me. On an endeavour as complex as a film, it is so easy to let things slip through the cracks, sometimes with devestating consequences (what - you forgot to order the crane? What the hell do we do with the 75 extras we ordered today??) It wasn't long before I had become an indespensable part of the inner circle, made stronger by my daily drives to and from work with Lydia where we would hash out the days events and commiserate about the stress we were under.

Principal photography finally loomed near and we got the word that Eric was coming to Los Angeles from his home in Long Island. Lydia took me aside. "I need you to become Eric's guide and best friend," she said quietly. "He's all alone here and doesn't know his way around."
To my unanswered question she handed me the keys to her car. "Take Joe, the driver, and you can use my car. Go meet him at the airport."

I had a stack of paperwork a mile high on my little desk behind the furnace, many phone calls to make and return, and a niggling fear that something might escape me on these last critical days before we started filming but they went out of my head without a second thought.

"Sure!" I said, and with a flourish and went to find Joe. But not before I went to the bathroom and made sure my hair was bouncy bouncy (this was the 80's folks), my makeup looked fresh and my lip gloss was fully loaded.

Next: Eric Roberts, horses, and me

Film credit from above: On the set of Miss Lonelyhearts. Me, Arthur Hill (standing) and Eric Roberts (photo from author's collection)